1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to electronic commerce and, in particular, to networks for facilitating electronic commerce. Still more particularly, the present invention is directed to systems, software, and methods for Internet commerce that is facilitated and leveraged by the personal and business connections of the parties involved, and allowing users to explore the connections among themselves and other buyers and sellers, and rating the performance of such transactions.
2. Description of the Related Art
Commercial transactions conducted through electronic communication (e.g., via the World Wide Web (the Web)), commonly known as “e-commerce”, are a significant segment of the global economy. In a typical e-commerce transaction, a desktop or laptop computer user decides upon a good or service that the user is interested in purchasing. The user then initiates access to a retailer's or service provider's e-commerce website via the Web, perhaps after conducting a search for the website with a commercial search engine.
After the desired e-commerce website is located, the user searches the website for the desired good or service, either by conducting a search of the website or by paging through the website content. The user may then add the desired product or service to a virtual “shopping cart” that collects the user's intended purchases by selecting a graphical “button” associated with a graphical or textual description of the good or service. After the user indicates that all intended purchases have been added to the virtual “shopping cart,” the e-commerce website presents to the user a form into which the user enters and transmits payment information (e.g., credit card information). Once the payment information is approved, the website presents to the user a confirmation that transaction is complete and may indicate a delivery schedule or methodology.
There have been many attempts to join buyers and sellers, and to provide information about them to each other for purposes of enhancing e-commerce. For example, some websites provide an enhanced user rating service for online business transactions. Buyers and sellers rate other buyers and sellers with whom they do business, and provide prospective users with information they can use when deciding when to do business with another user. Objective criteria, such as credit information, are combined with subjective ratings to create a user profile. Objective criteria are also used to supplement user ratings to treat new users more fairly and prevent participants from engaging in collusion to inflate their ratings. The user profile may be shared among online services, so that a user's aggregate transaction and ratings history may be utilized at a number of websites.
Some websites provide friendship networking that allows users to meet new people, to date through friends and their friends, make new friends, and help friends meet new people. After the creation of a user profile, they enhance the formation of a personal and private community where people interact to view photos, profiles, connections to other people, send messages, ask for introductions, or suggest matches between people.
Another system provides product recommendations over an e-commerce network based on customer user browsing or purchasing behavior. The system derives product characterizations for products offered at an e-commerce site based on text descriptions of the products provided at the site. A customer characterization is generated for any customer browsing the e-commerce site. The customer characterizations include aggregation of derived product characterizations associated with products bought and/or browsed by that customer. A peer group is formed by clustering customers having similar customer characterizations. Recommendations are then made to a customer based on the processed characterization and peer group data.
Yet another website includes searching a database for data on previous sales of similar items at online commerce websites. Using these data, the seller gets a recommendation about the best way to sell the item. If data about similar items are not available in the database, the method allows the seller to start an agent program that will search various sites for the data over a period of time.
Still another system provides samples to users in exchange for feedback that is provided to subsequent users considering purchasing the product. Products available for purchase from an e-commerce site are provided for a sampling program to users. A predetermined number of users are allowed to sample the product. Feedback from the users is solicited and tracked to provide additional information to the seller and/or potential customers. In addition, some websites register, store, and manage a user's unique authentication credentials, such as user names, passwords, and other personal information, over a network, and for allowing users to link to and log onto other websites using the authentication credentials.
Although each of these solutions has some usefulness, their shortcomings collectively represent significant impediments to the conduct of e-commerce, which are addressed and overcome by the present invention.